[Python-Dev] Possible language summit topic: buildbots (original) (raw)
Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Fri Oct 30 17:21:06 CET 2009
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Hello,
Sorry for the little redundancy, I would like to underline Jean-Paul's suggestion here:
Le Sun, 25 Oct 2009 14:05:12 +0000, exarkun a écrit :
I think that money can help in two ways in this case.
First, there are now a multitude of cloud hosting providers which will operate a slave machine for you. BuildBot has even begun to support this deployment use-case by allowing you to start up and shut down vms on demand to save on costs. Amazon's EC2 service is supported out of the box in the latest release.
I'm not a PSF member, but it seems to me that the PSF could ask Amazon (or any other virtual machine business anyway) to donate a small number of permanent EC2 instances in order to run buildslaves on. After all, big companies often like sponsoring open-source projects, especially when the project is well-known and the donation is cheap for them.
This would have several advantages:
- the machines are administered by the provider: we don't have to worry about failed hardware, connectivity loss etc.
- any Python core developer could get ssh access to the VMs to run tests directly, since they would be dedicated buildbot instances
- they are not tied to a particular owner when it comes to fixing system problems, which means we eliminate a single point of failure: if a volunteer gets demotivated/bored/missing in action, someone can replace him/her easily
- there are a number of various OS images available (of course, we still need competent people to install the required software -- buildbot, etc.)
Since I've never used any such service ("cloud"-based VMs), I'm not sure what the downsides would be. But it seems to be that it would be at least worth trying. Right now we have around 15 buildbots but two thirds of them are down, the others sometimes fail or disconnect in erratic ways and it's difficult for "regular" core developers to be aware of what's precisely going on.
Of course this could also be a broken idea, for whatever reason I'm not aware of.
Regards
Antoine.
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